Only a few days to go before my B2 students from the EOI will be taking their mock exams. Not many students like these mock tests, but as a matter of fact, they are a very useful tool for both, teachers and students as the results give information on where a student stands. Meaning by this that, mock exams help students get an idea of their strong and weak points within language learning and the target language they are supposed to have by the end of the year and allows them time to focus on what needs to be improved.

Anyway, here’s a word formation activity (typical U.E format) on the Topic of Health. In a word formation activity, you are given a text with blanks that you have to fill in with the word that is in brackets. The words in brackets have to be changed according to the type of word you will need to complete the activity and the transformation could be of any type (you may have a verb that needs to be transformed into an adjective, for example).

Hello! Yes there are some rules but the first thing you’ll need to do is detect what type of word you need if you’re talking about a word formation activity. By this I mean deciding if the blank is for an adverb, adjective, noun, etc. Once you’ve decided this, you’ll need to know which derivation morpheme is necessary. So, it basically involves some rules that are applied according to what type of word class we have and what type of word are we going to change it into. There are some basic rules such as adjective +ly for adverbs (badly) or verb + ion/ment for nouns (dictation and attachment) etc, but there are also many other morphemes and, of course, exceptions. So I would really recommend always having a dictionary available to check this and keeping a wide eye open on word families. Good luck!